I have come to grips with almost everything about Windows 10 that is different from previous versions. One of the key differences is that both the menu bar and the caption bar are white. I have found that the grey, 3D, look that you get with a toolbar made of %ib buttons and when you use %bx looks incongruous against this. I worked out that I wasn't keen on redesigning all my icons, so I experimented in Paint with various colours.

Now I know that it is possible to have coloured bars in Win 10, because MS apps do so. But, the function SetSysColors has an affect on all windows, allegedly, as MSDN puts it:

"The SetSysColors function sends a WM_SYSCOLORCHANGE message to all windows to inform them of the change in color. It also directs the system to repaint the affected portions of all currently visible windows."

Does anyone know of a routine to affect the colour only of the current app?

For menus, have you tried experimenting with %em (see the enhancements file)? Although %em is specifically for added icons, I think that you will find that it provides a mechanism to set the background colour.

thank you for pointing out this possibility, but unfortunately it only relates to the drop-down menu once you have selected a top level menu item. I don't think I'd tried the theme1 and theme2 options but I had certainly tried w7 and w8. I use %em in one program, were it doesn't seem to matter that the line spacing is enlarged to cope with the 16 x 16 icons instead of the 13 x 13 icons that are usually used for this purpose in a Windows program. In any case, I thought I'd keep my mouth shut about this particular issue because it was looking a gift horse in the mouth, and you already went to considerable effort to provide this facility.

The problem really is not in the drop-down menu itself but in the top level menu bar and a caption bar which in Windows 10 for an FTN 95 program are undifferentiated and come up in white with black text. Microsoft seems again to have ignored its own user experience guidelines because the new range of applications in Windows 10 and also in Microsoft Office 2016 cram the caption bar with all manner of icons including some the have their own drop-down menus. These are put in in addition to the normal system menu icon. Not long ago Microsoft were telling us not to add (for example) the printer icon for quick access to the print menu, and now they are doing it themselves with gay abandon for all manner of functions.

With all these extra icons, and with the application caption centred in the bar, and with the normal three icons for minimise, restore, and close more widely spaced – perhaps so that they can be selected with a fingertip press – the caption line and the top level menu bar are differentiated after a fashion. It also helps differentiate them when the top level menu items are formed into tabs as part of a ribbon. But a really conventional Windows application just comes up with the two undifferentiated.

I can confirm that, when using %em, the main menu bar is drawn using the default (Microsoft) process whilst the drop-down menus are "user-drawn" by ClearWin+. So the various %em style options do not affect the main menu.